October 17, 2012

Asked about other lyricists, Darnielle admitted to not being current in hip hop, but praised "Ghostface [who] does something for poetry nerds like me." He praised Mary Chapin Carpenter, who recently stopped by Ithaca as well, but noted that with lyrics "I had this [negative] image of '70s acoustic guitar music – [and actually] it is a lot better. This image of guy sharing his feelings, but if you think of James Taylor for instance, doesn't sound like you think it does."

AVC: The process of going into the design at the same time as your writing is an unusual one. Have you always written that way?

MD: Maybe what’s unusual is that I pursued it, because I think we’ve all done it. On a certain level, when we were just drawing with crayons, we liked that certain words were in certain colors. The way education works these days, and certainly in the days when I was being educated, teachers told you that you had to use this font, and you had to write between the lines, and this is what was important. Things had to be regimented; they had to be routinized. They had to acquire a uniformity, and there’s some value in that. But I had always loved the way certain texts could evoke certain meanings. Part of that was that I grew up on films. I saw films all the time. My father was a filmmaker. We screened movies downstairs. We talked about them. We talked about the politics of image, the politics of angles and colors, how stories are shaped, all of that. For me, I was always aware of the vitality of the image of the page, and I’ve always loved illuminated text and graphic novels and comics. But I also loved the way newspapers looked, with advertising. Then, of course, web pages began to have a certain sense, and why certain things in advertising worked and were appealing, and why they didn’t. I think I was, like many people, infected by that visual profundity in our culture, but I just pursued it.

Musically, this album is also more diverse than your past two albums. You even have a saw in there for one song, I think. Did working with Yuka Honda inspire that?

She’s responsible for the general soundscape of the record. I knew I wanted to work with a woman producer, there are hardly any. But I also wanted to work with Yuka because I wanted to make a more keyboard based album, more representative of my musical sensibility and taste in a way. I'd say the guitar is fundamentally more focused for singer-songwriter music, and when you add limitation to that, it can sound Americana, or alt-country, or something like that, you know what I mean?

"I've never subscribed to that theory ... that all children's books should be for all kids. When I was a kid, I liked odd and weird things, and I think I would've been insulted if someone gave me a book with, you know, happy little bunnies and a book on feelings or whatever. So throughout my career, I've always tried to, I guess, challenge the kid and do modern-looking artwork, to use a hackneyed term, I guess."